Only days before the death of Peggy Railey, former detective Stan McNear happened to drive past the nursing home of the woman whose case he never closed.

He wondered if she could still be in there, helpless in bed the way he’d last seen her so many years ago.

McNear had made that visit in 1993. He needed Railey’s fingerprints to help prosecutors put the prime suspect in her attempted murder on trial.

“I was just hoping that maybe someday she might come around enough that she could tell us what really happened that night,” McNear recalled.

But that hope died with Railey on Monday, nearly a quarter-century after the crime.

It marked a turning point for McNear and so many others connected to one of Dallas’ most notorious criminal cases — the brothers torn apart forever, the preacher who fell, the lover still trying to explain, the children orphaned though their parents still lived, the woman who lingered, giving no hint of knowing, 100 miles away.

The trial of Railey’s husband, then-prominent Dallas pastor Walker Railey, was for Dallas what the O.J. Simpson trial was for Los Angeles or the Casey Anthony trial was for Orlando, Fla. Public opinion pronounced him guilty, but a jury did not.

“I guess you’d say it’s over,” McNear said last week.

The retired Dallas police detective was a lead investigator in the case. Six years after the crime, when he paid Peggy Railey that final visit in her Tyler nursing home, she appeared to have aged decades. To McNear, she already looked like a 90-year-old woman. She was 44.

She lay in bed in a fetal position, her mother by her side. As McNear approached, the tiny woman peered up at him and cowered. The nurses had warned that she often didn’t take well to strangers.

Her fingers were curled tightly together. A nurse helped McNear hold his ink pad as he straightened each finger enough to blacken it and press it to paper.

‘I knew he did it’

The first time McNear had seen Peggy Railey had been in the emergency room at Presbyterian Hospital the night of the crime, April 22, 1987. Her face was bright red, which doctors attributed to oxygen deprivation caused by the ligature someone tightened around her neck.

That was also the night McNear first met her husband. To McNear, Walker Railey seemed oddly serene for someone whose wife had been choked nearly to death. But the detective knew Railey was a pastor — leader of the prestigious First United Methodist Church of Dallas — and he thought maybe his spirituality was giving him strength.

Soon, however, it became apparent that Walker Railey’s story didn’t match the evidence. For instance, while he claimed he’d spent the evening doing research in the SMU library, cellphone records showed he’d made a call from close to home.

“We told him that things weren’t matching up and that we didn’t believe that it happened the way he was trying to tell us it happened,” McNear says. “He knew we were accusing him.”

Walker Railey later said he had spent part of the evening with his secret lover, Lucy Papillon.

Though he had entangled himself in lies, the investigators said, they failed to find any evidence directly linking him to the assault.

“I knew he did it, and he knew that I knew he did it,” the former detective said. “But there had been nothing that I had been able to do.”

It wasn’t the biggest case McNear had ever worked. That distinction belongs to the successful 1991 prosecution of Charles Albright, who was accused of killing three Dallas prostitutes and cutting their eyes out.

And there were cases McNear was never able to solve. But it haunts you more, he said, when you feel you got the right man but you can’t put him away.

“In my heart I always hoped that we would get another shot,” he said.

‘Great fear in my soul’

Peggy Railey’s brief death notice said nothing about that lost chance for justice, nothing about that night, nothing about the intervening 24 years.

It just said that Margaret Ellen, born in Milwaukee on Oct. 7, 1948, outlived her parents, William and Billie Jo Nicolai, earned her master’s degree in education at Southern Methodist University, taught at Ursuline Academy in Dallas and died in Tyler the day after Christmas.

It said nothing of the ornate sanctuary on Ross Avenue where Walker, entrusted with a high-status posting, stirred his congregants with passion and insight and where Peggy played the organ. It said only, “She was of the Methodist faith.”

It noted that she was outlived by her children, Megan and Ryan; her brother, Ted Nicolai, and his wife, Linda; her sister, Katherine Aronin; and “numerous nieces, nephews, and other relatives and friends.” It did not name Walker Railey.

It said the family held a private ceremony in Tyler. Family members chose not to speak for this story, saying they wished to remain outside the spotlight.

The public notice said nothing of the darker inner life that Peggy Railey revealed only in her journal, which police found in the Raileys’ Lake Highlands home the day after the attack.

A half-dozen threatening letters had arrived at the house. Police never proved who sent them.

“Father,” Peggy wrote, “there is great violence in my response, great anger in my being, great fear in my soul.” The journal was wrapped in a blanket, hidden in a closet.

‘A voice that’s honest’

Lucy Papillon did comment for this story. She was the other woman.

Papillon, a clinical psychologist, now practices in Beverly Hills, Calif. She has written two books, is working on a third and hosts an Internet radio show, according to drpapillon.com, her website. The radio show, called Breaking Through, follows a television show she previously hosted featuring “insights from that ‘death to birth’ experience,” the website says.

“She became much more aware of how spirituality was crucial in recovering and reclaiming several years ago, when a tragic set of circumstances forced her to completely rebuild her personal and professional life,” the site says. “However, she indeed knows that ‘to lose one’s life is to find it,’ albeit on a different, more substantive level.”

Papillon returned a phone call last week from The Dallas Morning News.

“I’m at a silent spiritual meditation retreat up in the mountains, so I can only come down and pick up messages like once a day,” she said.

Though Dallas is her hometown, Papillon said people here disowned her for her role as Railey’s secret mistress.

“I’d walk into a store and people would be whispering and pointing, or people would spit at me, or people would call and say they wished I were the one that had been strangled,” Papillon said. “I was just despised and hated.”

The notoriety follows her even today in California at age 70, she said, thanks to negative newspaper portrayals that remain online.

“There’s part of me that wants to put it behind me, but there’s another part that just really would like to finally have a voice that’s honest,” she said. Toward that end, she faxed a two-page statement.

“I am very sad for the family of Peggy,” the statement began. “I am aware that Peggy’s death signifies an end to any suffering Peggy might have had and perhaps provides peace that passes all human understanding for all who grieved for her for these many years, especially the family.”

Papillon said she asked Peggy Railey for forgiveness for the extramarital affair 25 years ago in a letter “that unfortunately Peggy never had the opportunity to read directly.” She said the experience has changed her profoundly.

“I now am a psychologist who must integrate Spirituality with every psychological issue I address with patients or during my ongoing radio show or at speaking engagements,” the statement said.

She said she has never known anything about the actual crime.

“I know nothing about that, then or now,” the statement said. “Nothing.”

Papillon ended the statement with an exhortation for all who have suffered in the crime’s aftermath to take spiritual strength from it as she has.

“For example, my walk includes thanking all who have hated me, despised me and passed terrible judgments on me,” she said. “I can only bless them for they created an opportunity for me to have to go to a much deeper Spiritual place inside. I am not the same person I was nor do I seek to compare Peggy’s suffering to mine. I just know ALL fades into God. …”

‘But is he really free?’

Kent Meredith also falls back on a faith in God. He was the foreman of the Bexar County jury that spent more than two weeks weighing the evidence in Walker Railey’s attempted murder trial.

He said Peggy Railey’s death feels like the loss of someone he knew.

“I don’t wake up with nightmares or anything like that,” Meredith said last week. “But certainly it’s a case that affects a lot of people. I think the jurors are some of those people.”

Meredith, who just turned 50, now lives in Lubbock and is manager of the United Spirit Arena at Texas Tech University. He and the other jurors spent three days deliberating and debating, a process that saw a split jury gradually come together in a unanimous “not guilty” verdict. Meredith says he was the last holdout for conviction.

“There was so much evidence pointing to his guilt that as a juror, I felt that he was guilty,” Meredith said. “I think most of the jury would probably agree that he probably did it. It just wasn’t proved according to law beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Meredith said he doesn’t fault prosecutors for that, as some people have. He said they laid out the evidence, and it was up to the jury to decide if there was enough. He thought there was, he said, but was unable to convince the others.

“All of a sudden, you’re the lone one, and you feel like you failed in some sense,” he said. In the end, he let himself be persuaded to vote not guilty.

Meredith said he has sometimes wondered whether he did all he could.

“I thought that over and over,” he said. “What more could I have done as a person? Knowing what we knew and only what we knew, I really don’t think I could have changed anything.”

He is comforted by the idea that the verdict will be followed eventually by a greater judgment.

“Yeah, he’s walking around free, but is he really free?” Meredith said. “And what’s going to happen when he does die?

“As a Christian, I believe those things happen.”

No retrial for Railey

If any justice remains to be dealt, it will not be by the state of Texas. Walker Railey, acquitted of trying to kill Peggy Railey, will not be tried for killing her now that she has died.

A murder trial would violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on trying a person twice for the same offense, said Russell Wilson, chief of the convictions integrity unit of the Dallas County district attorney’s office.

Law professors queried by The News agreed.

The Fifth Amendment says “no person shall be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” Some of the major court cases interpreting double jeopardy seem to have been written with the Railey case in mind.

In 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court said in Ashe vs. Swenson that if the state has failed once to prove that a defendant performed a particular act — choking Peggy Railey, for example — it cannot keep shopping the accusation around to other juries in slightly different forms to see if it will eventually stick.

“The idea is that it is fundamentally unfair to require a defendant to defend more than once against a fact establishing criminal liability if the prosecution fails in the initial effort to prove that fact,” said George Dix, holder of the George R. Killam Jr. chair of criminal law at the University of Texas at Austin.

Given the failure of the first prosecution, Dix said, “my guess is that this is pretty clear” in the Railey case.

SMU assistant law professor Jeffrey Bellin agreed because the state already failed to prove the foundation of the case: that Walker Railey attacked his wife.

“If the state could now convict Mr. Railey for murder based on this same conduct, Mr. Railey would have been, in the words of both the federal and Texas constitutions, ‘twice put in jeopardy’ for ‘the same offense,’” Bellin said.

Baylor University law professor Brian Serr concurred: A retrial, even if labeled murder instead of attempted murder, is out of the question.

“The jury did not believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the good reverend strangled her or hired someone else to do so,” Serr said. “Thus, the state would be collaterally barred from having a second or ‘double’ opportunity to do so in a murder prosecution now.”

It could be argued that attempted murder and murder are different offenses and that a second trial, therefore, would not really constitute double jeopardy. The Supreme Court hobbled that claim in 1932 in another famous case, Blockburger vs. United States.

The court said double jeopardy prohibits holding separate trials for supposedly different charges that are actually so similar as to be essentially the same.

A murder charge against Walker Railey would be essentially identical to the attempted murder charge — the same allegations and evidence — except for the victim’s death.

“Due to the clear similarity of the two offenses, and the jury acquittal in the initial trial, this is not a difficult case in terms of application of the double jeopardy right,” said Bellin.

That doesn’t mean that investigators wouldn’t have liked a second chance — or to have had today’s forensic and electronic technology available in the 1980s.

Ron Waldrop was the Dallas Police Department’s homicide commander at the time of the attack on Peggy Railey. The case was pioneering, he noted, in its use of cellphone technology to track Walker Railey’s movements.

That factor disproved Railey’s assertion of what time he was at the SMU library that night.

But Waldrop, who retired as assistant chief, recalls that it took a long time to get that information back. If detectives could have pinpointed Walker Railey’s whereabouts almost immediately, as they often do in cases today, they might have had the ammunition to approach him as a suspect much sooner.

“It would have changed the approach to him, and you can’t predict the outcome,” Waldrop said. “When police have information and they approach somebody, that’s a means to resolution right there.”

Brother vs. brother

Resolution is something that still eludes Gary Railey. He has not spoken to his brother Walker since their mother’s funeral more than 15 years ago.

Gary said he asked then why Walker had told the police that he thought Gary could have committed the attack.

“His response to me was ‘I didn’t say that,’” Gary Railey said. “I told him, ‘So that police officer who went on the stand and said that under oath was lying?’ He told me, ‘Yes.’”

Investigators McNear and Rick Silva testified that Gary Railey and his sister-in-law didn’t get along, but there was never any evidence suggesting involvement by Gary. Silva, however, testified that within six hours of the attack, that’s what Walker Railey was suggesting to police.

Gary Railey, 62, lives in Maryland. He says he is still bitter that his brother would set him up that way. The week after the attack, he flew to Dallas to spend time with Walker. And while he was on the plane, unbeknownst to him, FBI investigators were at his office because of Walker Railey’s accusation.

Fortunately, Gary Railey said, his alibi was airtight. He’d been working when the attack happened.

“What if I was off two days?” he said. I would have had one hell of a hard time justifying where I was. Did he care?”

Gary Railey dismissed the statement that Walker Railey gave to The News about Peggy Railey after her death. Walker Railey called his ex-wife — they were divorced in 1997, when Peggy Railey had been in a nursing home for a decade — “a smart, beautiful, immensely talented person. A faithful Christian and a wonderful mother and wife, she will be missed by all who knew her.”

His statement “was just trying to make himself look good,” Gary Railey said. “Walker Railey doesn’t give a damn for anybody else but himself.”

From Railey? Silence

Walker Railey, who lives in the Los Angeles area, did not respond to an interview request for this story.

Gary Railey hasn’t talked to his niece and nephew in all these years. He had let Peggy’s brother Ted know that he’d like to meet with them one day and have them meet his children, their cousins.

Family friends raised the Raileys’ children. Peggy’s parents, the Nicolais, agreed that for them to visit their mother in her vegetative state would be too traumatic, so they were kept away.

The children eventually gave up the name Railey. Gary Railey said he hopes that whatever part of the relationship might survive can be restored some day.

“They still have an uncle and I’d very much love to see them,” he said. “But I would not want that until they see fit to do it.

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